![]() When old Soviet archives and museums finally opened to the public, Western intelligence agencies and armor historians began to realize that many of the scariest Soviet tanks were one-offs or completely fictitious. In the decade that followed, Armor continued to publish profiles that described future enemy vehicles with extra-large cannons. ![]() Gathering information on Soviet armament was like “reading tea leaves,” says Steven Zaloga, a senior analyst at the Teal Group and expert on armored vehicles.Īs a result, the Pentagon continued to worry about gigantic tank guns even after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. ![]() Granted, separating fact from fiction could be extremely difficult during the Cold War. Russia’s current T-80s and T-90s still use upgraded versions of the 125-millimeter 2A46 gun that first entered service more than 50 years ago. In the end, the Soviets never fielded any massive guns on tanks or tank destroyers. The Soviets could readily turn the “new long-barreled 152-millimeter field gun of the 2S5 self-propelled gun” into a deadly anti-tank weapon, explains a piece in a 1985 issue of Armor, the official publication of the U.S. Members of the NATO alliance finally closed this “gun gap” by the end of that decade, with 120-millimeter cannon designs of their own.Īmid this parity, American and European analysts worried that enemy cannons would just keep getting bigger. “The Warsaw Pact will outproduce NATO in large-gun, advanced-armor tanks more than 4:1,” warns a recently declassified Central Intelligence Agency article from 1980. ![]() By contrast, the 105-millimeter cannon was the standard for NATO tanks right into the 1980s. The vehicles’ barrel diameters jumped from 100 millimeters to 125 millimeters. ![]() Still, the USSR’s main battle tanks did sport progressively bigger main guns between 19. Engineers might find room for 25 or 30 large rounds in the same cramped spaces that could fit 40 smaller shells. Small turrets didn’t lend themselves to the huge ammunition the bigger cannons needed. ![]()
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